More than four weeks remain of the summer-theater season, and the end of the year is more than five months off, but it seems likely there won't be a better performance in area theater during 2014 than Mark H. Dold gives in "Breaking the Code" at Barrington Stage Company, nor a better production overall.

As good as director Joe Calarco's work was on BSC's season-opening mainstage show, "Kiss Me, Kate," his "Breaking the Code" is superior, packing both intellectual heft and great emotional power into the story of British mathematician Alan Turing, the father of computer science. About 20 minutes into the first act, a middle-aged man in the audience had become so engrossed in the production that he absent-mindedly exclaimed, "This is awesome!"

Calarco brings a cinematic fluidity to Hugh Whitemore's 1986 play, which starred Derek Jacobi as Turing in London, on Broadway and in a 1996 BBC film that aired in this country on PBS. Performed on a slightly raked wooden platform that's bare except for a table, a few chairs and the most basic of props (the scenic design is by Brian Prather), the production moves freely between key periods in Turing's life, from his school days in 1929 to his last days in 1954. Dold as Turning is onstage throughout, and the other seven actors are almost continuously present; they usually sit on chairs on either side of the platform when they're not in scenes, reacting to what's going on, though at times, when their character is being mentioned or Turing is thinking of them, they become a silent, spectral part of the scene.

Turing was a math genius who helped win World War II by breaking the Nazi's fiendishly complex Enigma code and conceived a "thinking machine" that became the basis for the earliest computers. He also suffered from a pronounced stammer, was abrupt with people and otherwise lacked social skills — in hindsight, Aspergers seems likely — and was gay at a time when homosexual acts were criminal offenses in England.

His most complete love affair was his first, as a teen, with a fellow student, Christopher (Mike Donovan); in the play's account of his life, Turing would never again find a romantic partner who also stimulated him intellectually. Instead, he sought attention from men who were impossible as long-term partners, including foreign boys and rough trade seeking money.

One of these, a working-class 19-year-old named Ron (Jefferson Farber), led to Turing's disgrace. As the play opens, Turing is reporting a robbery to the police, but, not wanting to mention Ron, he concocts a story. During the investigation, Turing admits an affair with Ron, is convicted and sentenced to probation and estrogen injections to reduce his libido. (He was finally pardoned, by Queen Elizabeth II, only last December.)

In a rumpled wool suit, a stubborn forelock falling onto his face, Dold is mesmerizing as Turing, creating a portrait of a man for whom scientific inquiry is just about all that matters. (He's as romantically inept as he is intellectually gifted.) When his boss at Bletchley Park, Britain's code-breaking center during the war, tells him, "You can't go through life ignoring the effect you have on other people or the effect other people have on you," Turing replies, "You can try."

Though heady in its science — Turing has a three-page monologue that discusses, among many other things, Godel's incompleteness theorems — the play is never intellectually inaccessible, and its human dramas are deep and rewarding. There isn't a false note or weak portrayal from any of the supporting cast, including Kyle Fabel as the police inspector, Annie Meisels as Turing's adoring colleague, Deborah Hedwall as his mother, Philip Kerr as his boss, Farber as Ron and Donovan in an effective double role, as Christopher and as young Greek man Turing meets on vacation.

Richly conceived and staged by Calarco, BSC's "Breaking the Code" is at the top of summer's must-see list.